sutton050

I listen to my local BBC radio station, not the national stations, just the local one.  I had this very channel inflicted on me when I was a child, and always thought the music choice was about 20 years out of date quite fuddy duddy. Anyway, I find myself now in middle age and can't help but stop and pause when a song I remember from my teens or twenties; songs which I think are awesomely cool I might add; come up on this very same radio station. I think the songs have aged well, it makes me want to continue listening to this channel which I so derided as a kid... And I can't help but think it makes me feel old. What would some young person of today think of my taste in music?

When after ten years with your significant other, know them inside and out and they turn around and declare... "You know what, I'll have a Fillet of Fish" Totally blind-sided me this has.

That moment you get half an hour into watching Brad Pitt in War Machine and the wife suddenly asks.... "Do you know him?" "Who?" "The actor!" "Which actor?" "Him with the grey hair?" "The General?" "Yes" "Brad Pitt" "Fuck off, that's not Brad Pitt" I gave up.

Oh its been a long hard fortnight, delivery of project at work and the World Cup took up most of the last week, my cars (yes both of them) have cost me a total of £1,100 so far and one of them is still broke... Hence I'm broke. However, I've been working on a project this very evening and whilst doing so I spotted something rather odd. You might have thought the Preacher was busy sorting out the festivities at PreachCon , however, I think he's been moonlighting on us... No he's not been playing a game other than Warcraft... Oh no... He's literally IN another game... Take a look... From NeebsGaming's video of Drunken Bar Fight ... Uncanny Valley or what mate! That's the Preach!  No-one knows where Ghosty is though...

A long time ago, in an office far away from where I now sit, I once worked with a chap I still refer to as the best programmer I've ever met. This was a guy who could take the whole code base, in Delphi, home and over a single weekend re-write it in Java. This was a guy who I saw, from scratch, write a C controller for an embedded PIC to capture an image from a supposedly incompatible TTL driven camera and then an analyzer for the captured images which would detect and show motion, making for our common employer their best ever selling product a cheap security motion detection system, which didn't rely on relatively expensive high resolution cameras. It was awe inspiring as a newly graduated programmer, whom had a huge background in DOS programming, but whom had never worked in Enterprise level development before. I sat next to what I still regard as near genius. This very same chap was also the worst programmer I've ever worked with. Because he was so highly functioning he...

In the 1990's it was common to have to tell folks not to use "popular" password, like "sex", or "god", believe it or not even "password" and "secret".  Since then times have moved on, folks have become very adept at using other characters in their passwords... Unfortunately, this is (very seriously) what one of our IT bods here has just found on a machine: Props to the user for mixing in some numbers, a word and a symbol, however... We can all see the flaw in their storing the password. (Thanks to our IT Manager for letting me use his picture - it is a lovely left hand, I wonder if he does hand modelling?)

Happy New Year... Now fuck off and stop saying I'm not festive!

Its happened, the announcement with not quite enough information, but it did happen and the WoW orientated internet has slightly melted over it, everyone and their dog on YouTube have posted opinion pieces on whether this "in development" service will fullfil their desires.  I have no opinion in that, instead I'm going to talk about my Warcraft Experience... I first met the world that is Warcraft with "Warcraft II", which I remember my brother and I bought whilst on a trip into Nottingham, we bought it from GAME on Lister Gate, and talked about it incessantly as our parents made us trudge around Marks & Spencers, rather then rush home to play immediately. We played this on our Intel 80486-SX2-50Mhz, with 4MB of RAM and a 128K S8 video card - VGA baby! I don't remember finishing the game, I have to be honest, I don't remember it that much... However, I still have the game, the exact box we bought is proudly on the shelf, and has been visible behind me...

As a systems admin, or dev ops, or whatever your job title might be, never ever assume that the person you're handing a system to has a clue.  This might seem harsh, but it's true, and proves itself true time and time again. "Assumption is the mother of all f**k ups" About a year ago I deployed a system which automatically sent requests to remote machines (via SMS) getting those machines to report their status or send back error information, but also to gather some basic information. It has run happily for a whole year, it has been all pretty plain sailing, the hours and hours of work I put into it, to automate it and keep it self-sustained have paid off, zero faults, zero down time, self-regulation is the way forward for me; even if it took slightly longer to put the system in place, it has needed no human input for nearing a year! However, the unit needed to move, about a week ago, it needed be physically picked up and taken out of my small server room and into the ...